For decades, we’ve been trying to harness and convert energy from one form to another in hope of meeting our day-to-day power requirements. In winters, we use electricity to keep our home warm and cool in summers. Smarter Energystar homes improve this model but they still don’t remove the need for Power plants.

NanoHoldings would change our lifes forever.

The Future of Energy is all about Clean and Renewable energy that doesn’t require any of the oil, coal and nuclear power plants. Energy is going to be Free!

Watch the video, I’m sure you will be amazed.

Pythagoras Solar has come up with new Glass windows that fit into your apartments, offices and generate electricity throughout the day. In addition they can be used to control the light and heat entering the rooms. The company is calling it the industry’s “first energy efficient, transparent and high power-density photovoltaic glass unit”.

The new product could show up in curtain walls, skylights or windows. It both blocks the sun to keep it cool inside and captures sunlight to create solar energy.

The video below talks about how the Solar windows work:

And a preview of how much these solar Windows would cost:

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Scientists have built the world’s  smallest petrol engine that is tiny enough to power a Watch.

The mini-combustion engine can run for two years on a single dose of a light fuel.

To give you an estimate of the power, it produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite having a size less than a centimetre long . If the technology continues to innovate with the same pace, it could be used to power laptops and mobile phones for months.

Energy evangelists believe that this new mini-motor can make batteries look conventional and even phase them out in half decade.

The engine has been produced by engineers at the University of Birmingham.

“We are looking at an industrial revolution happening in peoples’ pockets. The breakthrough is an enormous step forward. Devices which need re- charging or new batteries are a problem but in six years will be a thing of the past.”

These tiny engines would find applications in other fields such as medical, military gadgets, and future robots.

Today, charging an ordinary battery to deliver one unit of energy involves putting 2,000 units into it. This is due to the fact that energy is wated at several steps before it is effectively stored. On the contrary this engine produces energy locally,  and hence  is far more efficient.

Micro engines have been produced several times in the past, but all of them failed at dissipating heat to surroundings, and burned themselves over a small period of operation. The Birmingham team overcame this by using heat-resistant materials such as ceramic and silicon carbide. They brought together all the engineering disciplines, both materials, chemical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering.

We’re excited about this more than Bloom Energy,  a new Energy revolution.

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BMW is hoping to change this.  Most manufacturers rely on traditional — and heavy– steel car bodies, but the BMW hopes that carbon fiber components could lead electric cars into the future.

Mitsubishi has released its first electric car series under the rather uninspiring model designation i-MiEV. It’s a simply furnished compact car with an oval body and lithium-ion batteries under the floor panel. With one charge of the battery, the vehicle can travel 100 kilometers (62 miles) in summer or 60 kilometers (37 miles) in winter. It costs ?34,390 ($45,240).

Nissan’s electric car, the Leaf — set to hit the German market next year — faces the same cost-benefit plight. Even so, European automobile journalists saw fit to name the Leaf their “Car of the Year.”

Car manufacturers are building sedans and high class models of electric cars, making them bulky and inefficient for battery lives.

BMW is attempting to break the cycle. BMW, 3 years from now,will launch a new construction type to Cars called as  Megacity Vehicle (MCV), which won’t contain steel or aluminum bodywork. Instead, it will have a light alloy frame in the car floor and a body made of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP).

CFRP is a dull black material which has a chemical structure similar to that of diamonds. It is sturdier than steel and weighs less than half as much. The MCV body will be 250 to 300 kilograms (550 to 660 pounds) lighter than that of a conventional electric car of the same size, compensating fully for the additional weight of the batteries.

BMW is alone in pursuing the concept — the boldest idea currently under development in the automobile world, and one which is an economic riddle for the competition. CFRP materials have been available for nearly 50 years and are used in the aviation and aerospace industries, in car racing and, most recently, in rotor blades for wind turbines. Still, the idea of mass-producing cars from the material would appear to make little sense.

CFRP is 50 times as expensive as steel. However, company engineers have set a goal of a tenfold reduction in production costs for CFRP. That would spell a true revolution in industrial engineering.

The Joint venture

The joint venture of SGL and BMW produces these carbon fibers, 10 times thinner than a human hair, in the northwestern United States. The manufacturing process consumes an enormous amount of electricity, but hydroelectric power is cheap in the mountainous state of Washington.

More significant cost reductions are to be achieved once the black mini-threads arrive in an industrial park outside the town of Wackersdorf in Bavaria. Here, on a site once meant for processing spent nuclear fuel rods, an unusual textiles factory is setting up shop to serve the auto body construction industry.

Four knitting machines, each as large as a train car, take up most of a 7,500-square-meter (80,700-square-foot) factory floor. But instead of producing material for T-shirts and jeans, the outsized machines produce carbon fiber fabric, at speeds no other manufacturer has even approached.

BMW, however, is using a compression mold that can harden CFRP components in just 10 minutes at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). A different chemical mixture of resin and a hardening agent, together with the enormous pressure in the mold, make this process possible.

The power for these bursts of speed comes from a battery packet with a storage capacity of 42 kilowatt hours. At the current state of lithium battery technology, just the vehicle’s battery set-up would cost ?40,000 and weigh more than half a ton.

The car’s potential range is also easy to deduct. With the engine performing at full capacity, the batteries would be drained in the space of 10 minutes — if they were even chemically capable of withstanding such a rapid discharge.

At this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans race, Audi sent a prototype of its high-voltage, high-speed car out to take an extra lap around the course, meant to illustrate the great potential of such a vehicle. The driver, though, was under orders not to drive at full speed — company engineers weren’t sure the batteries would last the entire lap if he did. One lap at Le Mans is 13.6 kilometers (8.5 miles) long.

Related: Long lasting battery: 5min charge drives Electric Car 600km

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Second biggest source of Energy consumption is the Lighting. We can chose LED light bulbs to illuminate Home and workplaces, effectively saving as large as 90% of the Energy spent by traditional Incandescent tubes/bulbs. Earlier, CFLs were considered as an effective replacement, but with advent of White LEDs, much higher efficiencies have been attained.

Philips, LG,and other leading electricals have started bringing great LED lamps to the market. A single 5 watt LED bulb would easily outperform a 25watt CFL and that too with a pure white light.

LED vs. CFL vs. Incandescent Energy efficiency

The reason is obvious, LED is the most effiecient since it completes almost all of the electrical energy into Light and very minimal amount of energy is dissipated. However a traditional light bulb spends more energy in  heating than emitting light.

Going by approximate figures a 60 watts Incansescent = 20 watts CFL = 3.5 watts LED

Lifetime

The lifetime of an LED bulb is nearly 50, 000 hours (~6 years), when run continously. Which is insanely great as compared to 8,000 hours of CFLs and  1200 hours of Incandescent bulbs.

Directional

Unlike other sources, LEDs tend to be directional due to their inherent design. However, newer designs with multiple LEDs aligned at different angles into a same bulb, make it possible to cover a wider area.

Time to Reach maximum Light

LEDs are instantaneous, taking only nano seconds. Incandescent takes order of 2-5 seconds. CFLs are slowest, taking upto 30 seconds to emit maximum lumens of energy.

Environmental friendliness

• Toxic material: LEDs and CFLs are both environmental friendly as they donot have mercury.
• Carbondioxide Emissions: Lower energy consumption decreases CO2 emissions and hence LEDs do 451 pounds/year, CFLs 1051 pounds/year, and Incandescent does 4500 pounds/year.

Drawbacks:

LEDs: They are realtive expensive today, but should get cheaper as cost of production is low. Another disadvantage is that its almost impossible to find High power LED bulbs. I haven’t seen many options above 10watts.

CFLs: They are not as efficient and take alot of time to reach full power.

Incandescent: Everything about them is actually a disadvantage.

Comparison of Real world performance:

Here is a comparison of LED against CFLs, Incandescent light sources:

Here’s a Philips LED:

another comaprison:

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Same is the case with the batteries that are used to power Electric cars.  Such cars have very long charging time, for instance, a minimal charge takes 30 minutes or more. And when you actually wish to move, it would need that charge.

One company has made the first breakthrough by inventing a Lithium Polymer battery that puts every other battery manufacturer to shame. DBM Energy has been manufacturing batteries that allow forklift trucks to operate in warehouses for 28 hours between charges. Their latest creation is called KOLIBRI, which has been deployed into a car and the results are pretty amazing.

The battery was put to test using standard Audi A2, a battery operated Electric car. With everything stock except for the battery, the car was set to benchmark the battery power.

With approx. 6 minutes of charge, the car traveled whooping 375 miles (600km) over a journey of seven hours averaging speeds of 55mph. On finishing the drive, CEO of DBM offered to recharge the phones of the reporters as it still had some juice left. 6 min charge time for 100 kWh – it is important to know with what kind of a fast charger it was done, but in anyway – if battery can sustain 2500 cycles with this kind of fast charger – it is another breakthrough. Question will in Charging Infrastructure, but it is 6 min for 100 kWh – too good to be true for a Lithium Metal Polymer!

The drive is now called Munich-Berlin project, with which DBM wanted to know if its batteries would work for road cars rather than just forklifts, and without a doubt it looks promising for almost everything from trucks to cars.

Comparison with Other batteries : Over 300 Wh/kg – to put it in perspective – Nissan Leaf 24 kWh battery will be less than 80 kg! We have heard that Renault Fluence 24 kWh battery weight is 240 kg.

One final piece of good news about this battery is DBM believes it can manufacture it cheaper than the other lithium ion batteries being developed. That means the premium for an electric car using a DBM battery solution should be lower than the competition.

Welcome to the future where Short Charges, Extended Battery life has become a reality. DBM seem to have solved both problems with wide range of battery options of batteries that charge insanely fast, and batteries that last really long.

This car is definitely was not optimized for optimal battery performance, if in future lighter cars are made, the efficiency could be even better.

375 miles for a 5 minute charge is something that anyone would beg for, making it to be more than enough for most journeys.

So when exactly are we getting these in EVs? It would take sometime till some car manufacturer holds the deal with DBM and puts these powerhouse into commercial cars. Going green would now be more easier.

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Ben Heck’s has made a clever hand-crank mobile charger, which can be of a great help when your smartphones is not easy on battery.

If you have the basic know how of electronics and hardware, its pretty easy and straight forward. A USB port provides five volts of power which is why the crank worked with the HTC EVO and should work with practically any smartphone.

And if you are not geek enough, you can always buy a crank charger, works with all USB phones/devices.

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This supercomputer named Grape-DR, resides in the Department of Information Science at the University of Tokyo. On the specs side it has 64 Intel Core i7-920 processors and an accelerator chip that can achieve 200 gigaflops with a lightbulb’s worth of power.

The power consumption is freaking low, and that’s why they Top the Little Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers, achieving 815.43 MFLOPS per Watt which now outperforms IBM’s located in Germany, capable of 773.38 MFLOPS per Watt.

As one could figure out, the Grape-DR supercomputer, in addition to be the greenest is apparently also the messiest of all. It pairs its 64 Core i7 processors with four Grape-DR accelerator chips, each of which consumes only 50 Watts of power giving out 200 GFLOPS of processing power. All together the chips improve the efficiency of the supercomputer as high as 5x Times. Being the greenest does not mean fastest— Its peak performance is 23.4 TFLOPS, putting it way behind even the 500th in the list. But that’s fine, Mother nature loves it ore than any other.

via Ubergizmo

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A chinese scientist is trying to bring back  line-of-sight networking (Bluetooth, Wifi are omni-directional), by streaming video to a laptop, Desktop, Smartphones/PDAs with nothing but ceiling-mounted blue LEDs.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims to have attained a 2Mbit per second internet connection that transmits data simply by modulating the flicker of the little diodes, and imperceptibly enough to have them serve as room lighting as well. Since LEDs consume only a partial amount of power that bulbs, it is the most energy efficient combo of Lighting+Networking we’ve see so far.

Looking closely, single mode Optical fibers work on the same basic concept: Quickly switch  lasers (based on LEDs as well) at a high frequency to interpret ZEROs and ONEs as data stream and then encode, compress them using proper techniques. On the receiving end, same process is reversed to get data back. We’ve seen several LED based communications but most of them traditionally needed a media (like fiber) to travel. the ones that traveled through air were painfully slow and unusable.

The current 2mbps may not be ideal for Home networking, but technology has scope of further improvement, above all, its a Green Tech solution we aspire for, for the meantime WiGig would offer great 7 Gigabit Wireless Home Networking solution.

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ARM manufactures high-performance mobile computing chips. Of course, these processors cannot match the performance offered by x86 processors but there’s something that still make them attractive, more attractive than x86 processors for server farms.

ARM’s  CEO Warren East said that servers based on ARM multicore processors should arrive within the next twelve months. The current architecture, designed for client-side computing, can surprisingly be also used in server applications.

Though the implementations of ARM have traditionally been aimed at relatively low performance optimized for minimum power consumption, but, we are seeing higher speed, multicore implementations now pushing up to 2 GHz. ARM’s A9 at 2 GHz has four cores, which makes them a viable candidate for servers. However, the main difference an ARM-based server processor would offer is the addition of high-speed communications interfaces.

No matter how fast these buses are, speed is definitely not an advantage ARM would offer. However, with a growing concern to reduce the amount of energy consumed by servers and server farms, ARM processors offer a great deal, especially the multi-core options in the higher range. ARM might solve part of the problem by offering a Green ServerFarm that would operate at less than 20% of the energy of the current Intel, AMD x86 server processors.

Obviously, we won’t see these processors being deployed in high-performance farms. What looks possible is that it might limit its options to the print and storage server market.

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A startup based in CA called Transonic Combustion has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. What this means practically is that a vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is in fact far better than so-called greener hybrid cars (like Toyota Prius) which gives 48 miles per gallon. Also, hybrid cars are cost several times more than the test vehicle developed by Transonic.

What makes the new Injection system Better?

The key is in heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion. The more intuitively you do it, better combustion you can yield, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company treats the gasoline(petrol) with a catalyst that “activates” it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.

Transonic’s injection system varies from direct injection in two ways: it uses supercritical fluids and doesn’t require a spark to ignite the fuel, something which totally new in petrol engines. The supercritical fluid mixes quickly with air when it’s injected into the cylinder.

Once the fuel is injected into the piston, the heat and pressure are enough to cause the fuel to combust without a spark (similar to what happens in diesel engines). Ignition can be timed to happen just when the piston is reaching the optimal point, so it can convert as much of the energy in the gasoline into mechanical movement as possible, without wasting energy by heating up the combustion chamber walls, as happens in conventional technologies. In order to make it possible, Transonic has developed proprietary software that lets the system adjust the injection precisely depending on the load put on the engine. Other Improvements include smaller engines boosted with turbocharging, improved valve timing, and direct injection, in which fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber rather than into an adjacent port.

The Scope

The aim is to increase the efficiency of existing combustion engines and not make them costly.  Transonic’s approach is “a promising way to improve on conventional direct injection.”

Mike Rocke, Transonic’s vice president of business dev, says that at a steady cruising speed of 50 miles per hour, the test car gets 98 miles per gallon.

The company has recently demonstrated the technology in its own test engine, and says it is currently testing it with three automakers. The company, is supported by venture-capital investments from Venrock and Khosla Ventures. They have plans to manufacture its system itself, rather than licensing the technology, first factory in 2013followed by production of cars by 2014.

Possibly we will have lots of EVs by that time. We’ve to wait and see which approach works best for us.

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As per stats from NationMaster, US alone uses 20.6 Million barrels of fuel everyday, followed by china at 7.5 Million

and India ranking 5th at 2.7Million. Even when burnt efficiently, this much fuel leads to 10,000s of tonnes of harmful gases/smoke to the environment. We need to bring it down to zero, Bloom Energy could be the first and automobiles the next one.

I’m not talking about high-end and fancy EVs like eWolf 2, which are way above what most people could afford. We need something that’s affordable, efficient and robust. Tata had introduced Nano: World’s cheapest car at $2,000 (or Indian Rs. 1,00,000) a price for which would, ordinarily, get you a MacBook. Tata is all set to take it to next level with world’s cheapest Electric Vehicle (EV), next year.

(image credits)

Tata Motors (the owners of Jaguars) claims that the Nano EV offers the “practicality of a real car”, compromising nothing in the pursuit of providing environment-friendly personal transportation for the modern consumer. It will seat four individuals comfortably in its spacious interiors. It will have a top speed of up to 160 km and an acceleration of 0-60 kmph in under 10 seconds.

Nano EV will be powered by super polymer lithium ion batteries, and Tata Indica Vista EV, would  provide superior energy density to conventional batteries.

In early 2011, they plan to unveil Tata Nano EV alond with Indica EV, and this keeps me excited. Tata’s product may or may not capture the market but will set the trend and build concept of  ”Affordable Green Cars”.

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PowerMeter provides a great interface to monitor, track, analyze, and optimize power usage. Now manufacturers can integrate various appliances to enable advanced Energy monitoring. Google PowerMeter is a software application being was developed to help consumers track their home electricity usage. The development of the software is part of an effort by Google to invest in Green and Renewable energy initiatives

The API will make “energy information more widely available to consumers”.

Google has laid-out data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user’s privacy and control on access to the information.

In addition, google is providing some code samples to get developers started in building their first device which integrates with powerMeter.
If you are interested, checkout google’s  PowerMeter blog for timely updates on the service.

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Google with it’s Google Energy, is trying a similar approach.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live, details at the end

The future is all about generating your own cheap electricity in greener ways, and a US startup believes that they have found a solution – “Powerhouse in a Box”.

Bloom energy, formerly “Ion America”,  comes-up with something that is truly powerful, and revolutionary. K.R. Sridhar has built what he claims to be a fuel cell that can power a typical US home for a year with zero emission. This equals 2 European and 4 Asian houses 24/7 x 365 days, that’s alot of energy.

KR had worked previously with NASA to build a handy device that could actually produce Oxygen for Mars. But the idea was dropped by the agency, and KR reversed the invention to make it a fuel cell.

Currently, these boxes cost $700,000-$800,000, but eventually in 5-10 years, there will be one in every home – and Sridhar thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen.

Two of these boxes combined together makeup to a size of a brick, and they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas)of upto size of refrigerator.

The fact  is that they’re already installed at datacenters in companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. Four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past 9 months.

Watch the Video Coverage from CBS:

The technology will be unveiled to public on wednesday, 24th feb, the countdown is already clicking on their website. Stay tuned for the unveiling, we will keep you updated @taranfx.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live

Energy Saver: Built with our patented solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom’s Energy Server™ is a new class of distributed power generator, producing clean, reliable, affordable electricity at the customer site.

Fuel cells are devices that convert fuel into electricity through a clean electro-chemical process rather than dirty combustion. They are like batteries except that they always run. Our particular type of fuel cell technology is different than legacy “hydrogen” fuel cells in four main ways:

1. Low cost materials – our cells use a common sand-like powder instead of precious
   metals like platinum or corrosive materials like acids.
2. High electrical efficiency – we can convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the
   rate of some legacy technologies
3. Fuel flexibility – our systems are capable of using either renewable or fossil fuels
4. Reversible – our technology is capable of both energy generation and storage

Each Bloom Energy Server provides 100kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 100 average homes or a small office building… day and night, in roughly the footprint of a standard parking space. For more power simply add more energy servers.

At the heart of every Energy Server™ is Bloom’s patented solid oxide fuel cell technology.

Each Energy Server consists of thousands of Bloom’s fuel cells. Each cell is a flat solid ceramic square made from a common sand-like “powder.”

Each Bloom Energy fuel cell is capable of producing about 25W… enough to power a light bulb. For more power, the cells are sandwiched, along with metal interconnect plates into a fuel cell “stack”. A few stacks, together about the size of a loaf of bread, is enough to power an average home.

In an Energy Server, multiple stacks are aggregated together into a “power module”, and then multiple power modules, along with a common fuel input and electrical output are assembled as a complete system.

For more power, multiple Energy Server systems can be deployed side by side.

In addition to Bloom’s unmatched performance, this modular architecture offers…

• easy and fast deployment
• inherent redundancy for fault tolerance
• high availability (one power module can be serviced while all others continue to operate)
• mobility

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In Early school education, we were taught that a lemon with brass, copper plates can generate 0.3 volts. And more intuitively, we’ve seen DIY iPhone Solar charger, but Oranges charging Apple iPhones? Wooah.. needs alot of patience, after all How many Oranges does it take to charge an Apple?

It may not be as good as innovative as Phone that Charges from Coke, but sure is fun for the enthusiasts.

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A new Prototype from Nokia is kind of a strange innovation. Charging the phone is as easy as pouring Coke, the popular beverage, into the phone. Under the hood, it generates energy from sugar, making it possible to manufacture Green phones that virtually are non-polluting.

This concept phone was created by designer Daizi Zheng, who says:

“The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out.”

It’s a great idea, but will it be adopted anytime soon? I seriously doubt. But following us @taranfx will definitely keep you updated.

P.S. Diet coke may not be suitable for this phone’s health

Cost of manufacture of these batteries is estimated to be several billion $s every year, and the environment pollution caused is almost irreversible.

To counter this problem, conducting polymers have long been thought to be a solution in developing lightweight, flexible, nonmetal batteries. But up until now, these polymers have had been impractical because regular paper can’t hold enough of them work effectively.

Thanks to the new research by ppsala researcher Maria Stromme and her team surrounding the use of Cladophora (green algae) in a flexible, ultrathin alternative, it looks as if we may finally be onto a good Green Technology. Researchers purport that these super skinny cells could be placed in areas where batteries are currently unable to go. Wha tI can think of is all those charged wall sensors, energized clothing or even light-up wrapping paper.

Cladophora can also be used to make a type of cellulose that has 100 times the surface area of cellulose found in paper. That means it can hold enough conducting polymers to effectively recharge and hold electricity for long amounts of time.

The algae-based paper sheet batteries hold up to 200% more charge than regular paper-based cellulose batteries, and they can recharge in as little as 11 seconds. Eventually, they could be used in any application that requires flexible electronics — for example, clothing or packaging that lights up. Perhaps most importantly, the algae batteries could one day cut down on e-waste from conventional metal batteries.

Better still, prototypes have shown the ability to hold a significant charge, but unfortunately for us all, no specific production date has been pegged.

Hitachi has come up with a  face-recognizing television that intends to save power, whenever you are not watching it. The prototype consists of a camera that looks for a face in front of it and whenever you glance away, a power-saving mode like shutting off display or reducing LCD brightness comes into picture.

Though this demo features a text instead of actually saving power, but the actual commercial product will be saving power. Looks promising for a single user.

But wait a minute what if there are multiple viewers, it can endup with all sorts of confusions.  Particularly, if you’ve got a few viewers trying to watch from a few feet further away than the first one, does camera handle all such scenarios effectively? Possibly we will have to wait for the prototype to solidify into a product to get our answers.

Meanwhile, watch it in action:

The News Claims that a boy had managed to create a working Solar Panel without actually using any silicon semiconductors (the basic ingredient of SolarPanel). Instead, he used the the thing that is available for free –Human Hair. He claims that he was able to achieve 9v, 18W solar panel.

The silicon semiconductor is what that makes the price go high, and hence difficult for developing countries to adopt.

‘I’m trying to produce commercially and distribute to the districts. We’ve already sent a couple out to the districts to test for feasibility,’ he said.

‘I searched for new, other renewable, affordable sources. People in these places are living the life of the stone age even in the 21st century,’ he said.

Milan, whose hero is the inventor Thomas Eddison, describes himself as lucky because his family could afford for him to receive a proper education while many other villagers are forced to work from an early age. Most of those from his village are illiterate.

There are a number of new technologies that are helping  bring down the cost, the Guy managed to make his solar panel for only  $39. He also claims that when mass produced the price could drop substantially down to under $10 a panel. This could be the cheapest Solar panel ever Built! This is insanely crazy. Scientists working on solar panels took years to come out with something that got defied by a kid.

How it Works:

Some chemistry is involved here.

The melanin in hair acts as an organic-semiconductor, and while the hair does not have the longevity that silicon panels have (months rather than years), these panels can be made cheaply and serviced with little to no complex knowledge. Using melanin as an organic semiconductor seems to be a newer idea, because information seems hard to come by, but we managed to find a research paper from 2007 that explored the energy absorption attributes of melanin, as well as some good background info for the science types.

If you wish to read further Follow the Original Paper (in PDF)

AMD has introduced a 40W six-core Opteron processor. The overhauled chip offers 31 percent higher performance-per-watt over a standard quad-core Opteron.

What’s New ?

• It’s Greener – The 40-watt 6-core Opteron delivers the same processing capacity with about 30% less power consumption.

• Leaner – Takes less Space – Implementing 6-core CPU’s allows businesses to get the same server capacity with one-sixth of the physical servers.
• Cheaper -

“This six-core Opteron – which operates on a 40 watt power band – is specifically tailored to ensure strong performance while helping to reduce power consumption,” Kerby told TG Daily. He added, “And unlike other chips manufactured by the competition [Intel Xeon], our six-core EE Opteron retains certain, much-loved features that are consistent with AMD’s HE iteration. For example, we have not reduced the memory speed, bus support, hyperthreading or cache size. As such, deployment of the 40W Opteron will undoubtedly extend well beyond Cloud 2.0 and social media environments.”

Jeff Jenkins of AMD expressed similar sentiments.

“The advent of cloud computing and social media networks have brought new datacenter requirements to the forefront,” explained Jenkins. “A number of companies have expressed interest in low-power solutions that don’t compromise virtualization capabilities or performance features. That is why we designed our six-core Opteron EE processor. It does more with less and helps address the very relevant challenge of maintaining dense data centers.”

“We’re still able to achieve up to 30% higher performance, as well as just above 30% higher performance-per-watt in that particular processor,” stated AMD Senior Product Manager Brent Kirby in an interview with Betanews. Another formula that works to AMD’s advantage in this demonstration: A rack with 24 servers, all using AMD’s current line of six-core Opteron SEs at the 75W power range, could be traded for a rack of 42 servers using new six-core Opteron EEs at 40W, and stay within the same power envelope.

But what is the performance trade-off, if any? Or to put it more bluntly, will those 42 EE servers perform any better, or even worse, than those 24 SE servers? We asked this question a number of different ways, and the answers we got harked back to a now-familiar AMD theme: For the customers who would consider buying EE in the first place, raw performance isn’t a real factor.

“For a lot of the cloud [server] guys, honestly, they realize that their computational utilization is not as high. It’s more about I/O and memory bandwidth, and getting them more memory,” responded Kirby. Of course, they’re trying to get the right balance of cores, but they’re also wanting to make sure they get enough memory capability, as well as I/O capability, within these servers. It becomes a more important criteria than just raw compute power.”

The importance seems a bit clearer when you consider AMD’s assertion that the power savings per server rack could come up to $50,000, or could surpass $1 million per year for a data center with 25 racks. But that assumes workloads stay the same, and a more accurate assessment of actual power savings when two racks so configured are given similar workloads, has yet to be conducted. Suffice it to say that the EE’s SPEC scores are indeed impressive: A two-way server running a pair of Opteron 2419 EE six-core processors scored a 1,614 on the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark test, compared to the same brand of server (ZT Systems 1224Ra) running a pair of quad-core Opteron 2384s, which scored a 1,166 on the same test. That’s to say, the 2419 delivered better efficiency for the performance it did deliver.

The EE rollout isn’t the only news from AMD this morning: Senior Product Manager Bart Arnold confirmed to Betanews that throughout the first half of next year, the company will bring back its 4000 and 6000 product line designations, to accompany the 2000 and 8000 series it’s been running with this year. This according to a plan first put forth last April.

“The 6000 series will be aimed at the performance market; that’s our ‘Magny-Cours’ product. It’s going to have two variations: one 12-core and one 8-core,” stated Arnold. “Then in the second quarter, we’re going to be releasing our C32 ‘Lisbon’ platform, the 4000 series. That is going to be aimed at the market that is very concerned with power efficiency as well as cost-efficiency; the people who are looking to get a little more bang for their buck. It’s not going to be quite as robust, it’s not going to support as much memory, but…when we release the EE version of that platform, it’s going to be really eye-popping low. I can’t really tell you at this point exactly how low yet, because we haven’t been able to test it, but we are planning on setting the power efficiency market on-end with that particular product.”

But once again, the questions will probably include, how much or how little of a performance tradeoff will there be, for those investing in the 4000 series; and what gains will data centers experience by going all the way with a 12-core setup?

“I think the answer to that is found in consolidation,” Arnold responded. “I think that the number of cores that the product is going to have, along with the memory scale with its four memory channels, will allow them to run, in the case of virtualization, a whole lot of virtual machines to consolidate their data center further.”

So it would appear that AMD’s typical value proposition, including with its latest EE announced today — just drop it in place of your old Opteron — has a limited shelf life to it. Once the 8-core and 12-core era is upon us by Q2 2010, the argument will change to one that emphasizes the benefits of moving from a two-way to a one-way server. Just after that time also, AMD’s Brent Kirby confirmed to Betanews, the company will begin making its argument in favor of shifting from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, once costs are no longer a prohibitive factor .

Intel and AMD will continue to leapfrog each other and move the processing bar. Behind the headlines about advances in 6-core CPU’s, the two processor titans continue research and development of 8, 12, and even 16-core processors. The more processing capacity that can be squeezed into a single physical server, especially combined with lower power-consumption, the more companies can achieve with less space, less money, and a smaller carbon footprint.

via – Betanews, TGDaily

“We don’t want to make a choice between nature and the technology; we just want to bring nature to the same level when you have to take a decision,” Vie said by telephone from Switzerland.

“Jobs are important but not jobs to the detriment of nature,” he said. “We have done that too much and look where we have arrived.”

The new analysis shows 869 species became extinct or extinct in the wild since the year 1500 while 290 more species are considered critically endangered and possibly extinct.

At least 16,928 species are threatened with extinction, including nearly one-third of amphibians, more than one in eight birds and nearly a quarter of mammals.

By comparison, the 2004 Red List showed 784 extinctions since 1500.

PROSPERITY AND BIODIVERSITY

The report said this is not a comprehensive list with only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million described species analyzed. The main reason has  been stated as the  environmental changes. Larger emission of CO2, and dangerous gases has mad some irreversible changes to the living beings.

Earlier, It was reported that due to high RF usage, certain species of birds suffered heavy losses in number. A certain breed of Sparrow found in Asia has become extinct as it died from RF power emitted from cellular mobiles.

The number of extinctions is “a gross underestimate but it does provide a useful snapshot of what is happening to all forms of life on Earth,” the study authors wrote. “It’s much more severe than the economic crisis or the bank crisis,” Vie said. “You can lose a core industry but you can rebuild one. In nature, if you lose it, you lose it, and you’re losing a lot of capital that cannot be replaced.”

He said the notion that biodiversity is secondary to economic health is largely a view held by countries in North America, Europe and elsewhere, where the connection to natural products is less direct. Technology enabled us to stay as far away from the nature and intake of out un-Natural products has made things worse.

In less developed areas, there is a direct line between human prosperity and biodiversity.

In much of the world, Vie said, “The main problem every day is not to find a job, it’s to find food … and in most places this comes from biodiversity, from nature, from fish and plants.”

For land-based species, the main threat is habitat destruction through farming, logging and development.

Climate change is not now the main threat to biodiversity but that could change, the report said.

In examining 17,000 species of birds, amphibians and reef-building corals, the report found a significant proportion that are not now threatened are susceptible to climate change, including 30 percent of birds, 51 percent of corals and 41 percent of amphibians that are not threatened now.

A very detailed e-article has been published here.

Then this guide is for you. REad on a findout how can you stripe your grass like demonstrated on left.

Instructables posts an interesting article. All you will need to get started is:

1. pvc pipe 3″ thick and the width of the back wheels or slightly smaller.(see picture)

2. 3/4″ thick plywood

3. 2 “eye” hooks big enough for 2 plastic ties to go through.

4. Several long plastic ties

5. drill

6. screwdriver

7. 3″ hole saw (optional)

8. Gravel or sand.

Available at Instructables

They’re applying the smart, quick, hardware level idling you find on a CPU to many system parts. The result: systems that idle at 10x less juice.

The technology  is being applied to things like USB ports, which in 3.0, will go from polling (clock based, always checking) devices to being managed via events, so they can sleep whenever not being used. And graphics, when the page isn’t changing, can be run out of a frame buffer so the GPU and video RAM can sleep. More sleep, refers to additional milliseconds or longer. This adds up, over the course of a day when people stop to read or step away from their computers. In the past, the OS controlled the power savings, and that required power to process in turn, so you were using the system’s power to manage power, keeping those other components from ever really turning off. By doing power management with more granularity, in hardware and software together, you can switching things on/off fast enough to fit in lots of “naps” and you can also do it with less processing overhead.

This poer saving will boost the UMPC, mobile market, but it will goto desktops aswell.

source:gizmodo

Earlier, I had posted a solar panel DIY Solar powered charging your iPhone, bicycle powered usb charger and several other Green initiative tips. And now, I found a tutorial which lets you setup complete powerhouse (ofcourse for household use only) by which you can power your Home theater, refrigerator, PCS and what not. So free electricity is not just a dream, with decrease in prices of solar panels, its now more affordable than ever.

Although, it may seem a little tough, the setup is fairly simple and straightforward.  If you endup generating enough energy to power your home, the local city power administration is actually obligated to purchase any extra power from you!

Here is the guide by Instructables: Step by Step guide.

Enjoy Go Green, keep the nature Clean!